Colin’s feet were only a couple of yards away from the mountain of walruses. He twisted, found his footing, grabbed the axe and hauled himself erect. The steel head came free. He began to move.
The leader and his consort hurled themselves out of the water now, followed by more of the pack. They landed on the screaming pile of walruses snapping, chewing, tearing.
Ross suddenly found himself up to his knees in water. He began to run towards Kate. Behind him, the unsteady wall of walruses broke like a wave, tumbling forward, burying the body of the old bull.
Ross ran on but he was suddenly running up hill.
And there was a sound like thunder. The rope snapped taut. The gun tore out of the ground and sailed away over the ice. Kate saw the ice just beyond her feet rear up into a cliff, the rope at her waist leading up, over its crystal edge.
The floe had cracked in two, and Colin was on the other half.
The rope round her waist snapped taut, almost lifting her off the ice, the loop ripping up her back until it caught under her arms. She stood up, moving her body carefully because it felt as if the rope had stripped off most of the skin between waist and neck. Thank God, she thought, I wasn’t facing the other way.
Abruptly the rope loosened, and as Kate looked across the five feet of agitated water, there was Colin standing unsteadily fighting for his balance. Kate began to run backwards tightening the rope. He jumped. The axe flew out of his hand. The rope snapped taut, he lurched forward in the air. She fell. He crashed into the ice thirty feet away from her just at the new edge of the floe.
As their half of the floe had lurched in the water, Job and Simon were hurled down on the net and a wave of icy water washed up among the advancing walruses. The killers had been following the main body of the herd, so there were none down here as yet, and Simon and Job had had no trouble in controlling the sluggish advance of the great maroon creatures. There were maybe twenty left out of the first surge. The ice was now the colour of beech leaves in autumn and was littered with the great still sacks of their corpses.
But the floe’s sudden lurch had a disastrous effect on Simon, for, as he stumbled on the net and fell, he sent the Remington tumbling end over end towards the water. The wave which swept up among the corpses at the edge of the ice took the sleek rifle lovingly and sucked it into the ocean.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Simon. He picked himself up wearily, slipped his mittens back over his hands and picked up one of the harpoons. He began to tie the rope to the end so that he wouldn’t lose it.
Job continued firing at the advancing walruses. Until he turned and saw the walrus which, unnoticed by either of them, had broken through the rotten ice between the camp and the hill, its approach covered by the shadow of the second empty sleeping tent, hulking towards Simon, burst through the tent, totally destroying it, and rushed towards Simon’s back. “Simon!” screamed Job now, but his voice was lost. He jerked the Weatherby up to his shoulder and shot the monster in the head, but the light high velocity bullet simply glanced off the huge tough bony dome of its skull. This was a job for the Remington, but the Remington was gone. Job ran forward as fast as he could. Simon was still tying the rope to the harpoon, blissfully unaware. Job stopped and squeezed off another shot. The top of the creature’s head seemed to vanish, but still its advance did not stop.
Job was only feet away now. Pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. He reversed it in his hands, holding it by the barrel, swinging the stock up like a club, running forward as the walrus swung its head back, the rolls of fat behind its stub of a neck bulging, for the killing stroke.
At last Simon heard something over the wild noise and turned.
Job brought the gun down on the bloody crown of the creature’s head, just as its tusks began to tear down. The stock splintered. The jar of the stroke numbed Job’s whole body. The walrus turned, its stroke uncompleted, the tusks still inches from Simon’s chest, and bellowed. Job stumbled back and fell, helpless. The walrus began to move towards him, still screaming; blood poured down its face, ran down its tusks and chest in a sluggish stream. Job floundered backwards, looking for something, anything, to protect himself with – but knowing there was nothing.
Simon discovered he was still holding the harpoon, and before his mind could react to the situation, his body was in fluid motion. The walrus, in turning its head towards Job, had exposed its throat to Simon, and, the harpoon, seemingly of its own accord, reached across the few feet which separated the man from the beast.
As though it had always been there, a silver shaft suddenly sprang from the walrus’s flopping maroon throat. Job stopped moving and looked at it, astounded. The walrus tried to turn its head back, but Simon threw himself forward, taking the harpoon under his right arm, and he twisted it deeper with all his wiry strength, until his chest was hard against the monster’s shoulder. The walrus tried to bellow again, and a great gout of blood came from its mouth. The flippers slipped. The head dropped. The tusks buried themselves in the ice on either side of Job’s ankles.
Ross was still lying stunned on the edge of the floe when another walrus exploded out of the water, hooked itself on to the ice two feet from him and began to lurch forward, bellowing indignantly. He considered moving, but remotely as in a dream. Really it wasn’t worth the trouble.
And then Kate was there, wielding the axe caught up off the ice where he had dropped it. He didn’t see what she did, but suddenly the walrus was no longer there. Kate was.
“Colin!” Her face was flushed and swollen by the force she had to put into her voice to make it even faintly audible to him, even though she was kneeling over him.
He began to pick himself up. She got up and helped him climb to his feet. For a moment there was a silence. The sea was still, innocent even of the black sail fins. Most of the dead walruses had sunk from sight. Those still alive were under the floe. Ross and Kate might have been a pair of lovers at the seaside, her shoulders tucked so tightly under his right arm, their heads so close together, their breath mingling in a pale tower above them.
Sluggishly at first, and then with increasing force the surviving walruses began to climb on to the other floe. By the time Ross and Kate thought to move they were piled in an untidy maroon heap slashed with dull yellow of the tusks. They were no longer screaming and over the silent sea came only the occasional ding-dong! of the two-tone bell call.
Ross and Kate turned and began to walk back, tired eyes on stumbling feet. With the other floe there so available and so obviously safe, their own refuge was now safe in turn. They had gone only two steps when Kate stubbed her foot on something sticking out of the ice. They stared at it dully. It was a steel peg. There was an orange rope tied to it. And forty feet from the peg the net began.
There were only a hundred and fifty feet of floe left. They stood, frozen by the realisation.
They had been fighting the walruses for more than an hour and, in that they were still alive, they had won. But they had lost so much of the floe that the piece they were on could only just contain their camp. And they had lost most of their stores also. Only those items they had moved into the dry were still undamaged, with the pieces of the boat, and the dynamite. They had lost all the guns. They had lost the will to fight any more; they had almost lost the will to live.
v
As the leader came under the humans’ floe, he almost casually took a final bull walrus floating vertically, its head above the water. They had had a good killing. They had taken more than fifty prime walruses, not counting the babies, for the cost of seven whales in all. The leader was deeply content, for, on top of all this, there were still the humans . . .